


File #TRQ.000300.JEZEK 013

by Ellicit



Series: The A. E. Doyle Library [1]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: All Just a Dream, Dream Logic, Gen, Quests, Unsettling Architecture, all cleaned up into a nice little story, or was it, this really was a dream i had and i was told to post it so here we are, with far too many run-on sentences
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-19
Updated: 2020-02-19
Packaged: 2021-02-28 06:08:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22799104
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ellicit/pseuds/Ellicit
Summary: Narrative of Maurits Elysian Ježek, regarding a strange and vivid dream. Taken from an email sent on February 10th of 2020 to Emily Halcyon Navarro, Assistant Librarian at the Albert E Doyle Memorial Library, Portland, Oregon.
Series: The A. E. Doyle Library [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1722571
Kudos: 4





	File #TRQ.000300.JEZEK 013

_Narrative of Maurits Elysian Ježek, regarding a strange and vivid dream. Taken from an email sent on February 10th of 2020 to Emily Halcyon Navarro, Assistant Librarian at the Albert E Doyle Memorial Library, Portland, Oregon._

_Narration begins._

I haven't set foot in a church in literal years, but it began just inside the doors of St Joseph's -- only, of course, it wasn't truly the church of my adolescence, which was all pale pine and grey-green-salmon brick, which this church was not. The _space_ was similar, I suppose. I stood in a wide-open narthex split by doors leading into the nave on either side, just as they should, but the middle was occupied not by the bathrooms and the central aisle, but by a collection of broad, square beams painted dark and criscrossing at every angle imaginable. Some part of my mind took note of this discrepancy even as the rest waved it away with an internal remark about how it had been repainted. The whole scene was dark, the ceiling invisible, the only light coming from candles scattered along the walls and throughout the structure that should not have been there. I looked down one of the aisles and saw my... Benjamin used to be one of my best friends, until we both moved for school and I came out of multiple closets two years into his time at seminary. We'd already been drifting apart and that rather accelerated things.

He wasn't dressed in full vestments, but the way he stood as he spoke to some of the parishoners made me think that perhaps he'd been ordained and would be celebrating the Mass, or whatever service was about to occur. I didn't want to interrupt. I wasn't even sure I wanted to talk to him. I turned down another aisle and walked until I saw the pew where my other former best friend (whose name, in an odd coincidence, is the same as my current housemate's) and her mother (a woman who I either got along with or hated, depending on the day) sat. I was about to sit down when I heard Ben behind me, calling me by my deadname.

I turned and looked at him, deliberately, then turned away until he called me "Elysian". And then, as is the way of dreams, he was introducing me to the Anglican bishop, who had also heard of me under my previous appellation and who I corrected in a way that implied he had merely misheard. This was about when I realized that there was no hope of anyone gendering me correctly, as I was in a dress, but I would be damned if I'd let them use the wrong _name_.

And then the ritual began.

My waking mind recognizes in it elements of the Easter Vigil, and of the ordinary procession of the Gospels, but in truth it was neither, and even in the dream I stumbled over the words and could only kneel on the pew and stare transfixed at the person-sized candle burning in the narthex, barely visible through the doors, and at the book raised high overhead as around me everyone kissed their thumbs and touched it as it went by and I wondered why I was there, knowing that I believed none of it, and half-copied the crowd lest I feel unfriendly eyes upon me. The music was wild and joyous and Ben's arm slid around my shoulders and my hand found Other Theresa's back and we swayed with our sides pressed together and laughed with our heads thrown back and under it all was the _unsettling_ current of _this is wrong and it cannot last._

My eyes slipped closed and when I opened them I was elsewhere.

I was walking on green grass under a bright sun, and I knew in the way of dreams that I had been walking for a long time through a landscape full of things that were... wrong? misplaced? though I could not remember anything of my previous journey until it held further relevance. My vision felt strangely narrowed. There was a hill in front of me which I had to climb. Someone who wasn't there, who I could not see just behind and to my left, told me that I would be given a break; there were plenty of trails left by "my kind" (an odd phrasing, but one I distinctly remember) for me to follow, they didn't say, and I just had to pick one. And once they hadn't pointed that out, I saw. At first they all looked the same, and easy, paths of grass of a different green with a gentle slope, but then I looked to my right and my sight expanded and I saw that none of them looked easy and many of them were bare dirt that would slip under my feet and throw me back down, and because of the way the hill curved two of the paths were shorter and I picked the one that had more tree roots and branches to hold on to and scrambled up to the top with a sense of exhilaration and pride that I picked the right one and also fear of what was to come.

(I'm still a little shaken by how real it all felt, Hal my love. I think I'd be a little worried about it being a real memory were it not that I can never _smell_ anything in dreams.)

At the top was a school, all red brick and tall reflective windows, the covered asphalt playground full of children -- were they children? I didn't look at it more than I had to because it wasn't real and I needed to be elsewhere and sure enough when I got far enough past it, it was like I'd slammed through an invisible barrier and my head hurt and I looked back to see the school was dark and broken down, the brick grey and crumbling and covered in ivy but the last few ?children? were still going inside. I turned away. To my left and ahead was a shiny silver building wider than it was tall and all spiraling and strange and radiating an uneasy familiarity (the doors. it felt like the doors.) and I did not want to go in or look at it. I saw cars or at least I hoped they were cars through the trees in front of me and I thought perhaps I could use one of them to drive away? (Dream-logic again. I still haven't learned how to hotwire a car.) And as I got closer I saw that one of them was mine, not just "mine" but exactly the same in appearance as my car in the waking world, and despite the bright sun I suddenly realized that I was so _cold_ , Hal, so even if I couldn't drive away I thought to myself that I should at least get in to warm up and charge my phone. But then... then I heard a child crying.

I heard a child whimpering and I was at the glass side door to the silver spiral building and I looked down and saw a kid, somewhere between 2 and 4 years, milk chocolate skin and dark poofy hair and a pink frilly dress, super adorable despite the fact that I think I couldn't see the whites of their eyes? and too young to have a real gender but I can't stop myself from thinking "she", possibly because of the dress. They/she looked up at the door and I knew she couldn't open it and had maybe found it locked but the knob turned easily under my hand and they scampered inside. I could see the green grass and blue sky through the glass sides of the stairwell. In front of me was a bright shining silver spiral staircase that had all of the steps twisted 90 degrees to form a ladder instead. I asked if she needed any help finding their parents and they didn't respond, just started climbing the slivery spiral staircase, but when I went to step out and close the door (I would be free if I left, if I wasn't needed) they looked back at me and made distressed noises and I knew I had to follow and help find her parents. And I was told -- by her? by someone who wasn't there? she couldn't speak, did I hear the words out loud or in my head? -- that Hawk, who the dream referred to by their screenname, who knows why, was up in the building and I needed to find them and bring them out. So I started climbing the ladder. I felt better having a purpose for being there, like maybe I'd be able to escape at the end.

The child scampered up the spiral ladder ahead of me, and stopped me at the top, perched unnervingly on a... railing?. The ladder had tightned as I climbed (though I do not remember climbing) until it was wrapped around me, more like an embrace to keep me from falling than a trap, and I knew needed to kiss my hand and touch it to a twisting-like-a-spring-or-vine piece of metal before I could be allowed to enter, to show respect, as I had done to so many other symbol-locks in so many other places on my journey that I cannot now remember. I did so, not without a little trepidation, and was allowed to climb to the top. I say "was allowed"-- I have no memory of the child moving, and she vanishes from the dream hereafter, but there was a sense of permission all the same.

When I stepped off the top of the not-stairs the walls were white and brightly lit with colorful posters. The hall ahead of me turned a sharp right corner about ten feet down. To my right was an alcove, no wider than the hall and maybe two meters deep, and _you_ were there and you turned away from the cluttered... sink and counters? laboratory space? with a wide smile and a happy bounce and I was so glad to see you and I think perhaps we kissed, though I have no clear memory of either that or of asking you a question, but all the same you said something about "you know me, can't resist the urge to experiment" in a tone that I have only known you to use in the waking world when you're pretending to be a _mad_ library scientist. You also said something about not expecting to see me (everything "you" said feels far fuzzier than anything said by whoever wasn't there) and I knew that I needed to ask you when I got out (woke up? the knowledge that this was a dream was almost there but didn't matter) if you had seen me in your dream last night.

I turned away from you and to the walls, then, knowing I needed to press on, and discovered that all the pictures were... I recognized what they were supposed to be -- lots of posters explaining various scientific experiments and advertising sports things in a color-tinted pop-art style, like you'd see in the halls of a university -- but when I looked closely instead of from a distance everything was warped and twisted and none of the anatomy or buildings had the right kind of lines and all the colors were blurred because (as I suddenly realized) all the images had been generated by an AI. I accepted this explanation matter-of-factly, my sense of fear and disquiet almost gone, and remarked to you that supposedly that's also a thing one's brain does in dreams (how very meta of me) before I turned to my right to walk down the hall to briefly examine the rowing team poster at the end (did I take your hand? did you follow me? I don't know and yet it seems important) which melted into something that suggested but was no longer a shirtless college boy leaning forward with the sunlight glinting off his muscles and looked to my right again around the corner, and then... nothing.

I know, that's hardly satisfying. I have the sense that I didn't wake up immediately, but that's the last thing I remember. I wish I knew what was around the corner; it seems... important, somehow.

_Narrative ends. Further context may be found filed under TRQ.000300.JEZEK, TRQ.000100.JEZEK, and TRQ.030200.LABYRINTH._

**Author's Note:**

> If you'd like to experience something like some of the paintings mentioned for yourself, searching for "StyleGAN architecture" should bring up some decent results. Or just take a look at the following Janelle Shane Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/JanelleCShane/status/1192831020547989505

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [#EXT.000709.ELSINORE](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23586430) by [mikawritesthings](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mikawritesthings/pseuds/mikawritesthings), [Nausicaa_E](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nausicaa_E/pseuds/Nausicaa_E)




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